Judge Ed Emmett: County must adapt to handle growth

Published 1:00 am, Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett wants to start a dialogue about restructuring county government.

As the unincorporated area grows, the county is tasked with funding transportation, healthcare and the jail system on a shoestring budget.

Prior to 1963, the city was annexing large swathes of land and engaging in strip annexation , which placed long, narrow stretches of land into city territory.

However, growth slowed when the Municipal Annexation Act of 1963 passed. The act limited city growth to 10 to 30 percent its size per year, outlawed strip annexation and established extraterritorial jurisdictions, giving a city the exclusive right to annex.

“Because of city debt, the City of Houston decided it wasn’t going to annex those subdivisions,” he said. “But the assumption was always that as subdivisions were built out, they would be annexed into the city.”

When that didn’t happen, the county was left with the bill but no means to pay for it. Now those subdivisions are turning 50 years old and needing repairs.

“We live in an urban environment, but the county was structured for rural areas,” he said. “Harris County is different from any other county in the state if not the nation.”

For example, 1.7 million of the 4 million Harris County residents live in unincorporated areas while 5,000 residents live in unincorporated Dallas County, he said.

The entire unincorporated area is funded mainly by property tax and a small percentage of the hotel occupancy tax, he said.

The problem is complicated by limited purpose annexation in which the city annexes shopping centers and revenue generators, but avoids adopting residential areas, he said. The city is able to do this by making deals with MUDs, where the MUDs get a portion of the tax revenue and the county receives nothing.

While the deals supplement MUD revenue, the county is left with less revenue to run the county.

So far, a solution remains elusive. Either the county has to share in the revenue of the MUDS or we have to help the MUDS provide new streets, said Emmett. However, MUDs have so far been unwilling to enter into partnerships that would either take money away from them or add responsibilities, he said.

“By the next census, unincorporated Harris County will be bigger than the city of Houston,” he said.

That’s why it’s important that voters approve a constitutional amendment allocating Rainy Day funds to transportation, he said.

“It’s vital that it passes. It provides about $1.2 billion a year but we need $4 billion. I’m afraid if we pass it some may say we solved the problem when really it’s putting a band aid on the wound. If we don’t pass this, within two years TxDOT will not have enough to build even a single new mile in Texas,” he said.